


Painting the Portrait of a Ripper

by rhodrymavelyne



Series: Scenes From Hannibal's Trial [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:48:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26735398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhodrymavelyne/pseuds/rhodrymavelyne
Summary: Ms. Vega is now painting a picture to the court of Hannibal Lecter as an intelligent psychopath. Yes, he’s pleaded guilty but she’s going to show how guilty he is, especially after he’s made a fool of her twice. What a pity he doesn’t seem to care. All he seems to care about is drinking in the presence of Will Graham. Bloody Chesapeake Ripper, tracking m/m into the courtroom…(wry grin)
Relationships: Alana Bloom/Margot Verger, Alana Bloom/Will Graham, Miriam Lass/Clarice Starling, Miriam Lass/Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Series: Scenes From Hannibal's Trial [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1945918
Kudos: 13





	Painting the Portrait of a Ripper

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a realistic depiction of a criminal trial. It's meant to be more in keeping with Will Graham's trial during Hassun in the second season of Hannibal, offering snapshot pictures of the trial and a moment in between. It's more of three interlocking stories than a series, although I've listed it as a series. It's part of what was summarized during one of the most beautiful parts of Hannibal Season 3: The Great Red Dragon where the young boy sings...thank you for paying for that, Bryan Fuller! Only Ms. Vega really irritated me during Hassun when she tried to paint a picture of Will Graham as an intelligent psychopath. At the same time I appreciated her theatricality along with seeing Maria Del Mar play her. Guess I wanted an excuse to bring her back with the right killer this time and have that killer, ahem, discomfit her? I don't own Hannibal but for months it has owned me.

This man was a monster. This man was being charged for brutal horrific murders. This man had convinced her another man was an intelligent psychopath, making a fool of her legal proceedings. And now he sat in the court like an emperor, looking down at the common plebians who dared to drag him down to face their justice. 

Oh, how Ms. Vega longed to make him squirm. All she’d managed to do was make him twitch. 

She’d settle for that. 

“This is not merely a monster. Dr. Hannibal Lecter is a toxin spreading into people’s lives, urging them to become killers themselves. It’s not enough for him to simply eat the rude. He has to corrupt the soul. He tried to corrupt the F.B.I. itself from within.”

Kade Purnell narrowed her eyes at this. She would have preferred a prosecution that simply dragged Will Graham in the mud. Jack Crawford as well. 

Well, tough. Ms. Vega had already made a fool of herself pushing Purnell’s agendas. This time she’d push one which would have the jury eating out of the palm of her hand. 

“He kidnapped Miriam Lass, kept her prisoner, brainwashed her, mutilated her, and turned her into his instrument. He manipulated his way into the lives of Jack Crawford and Will Graham, tried to turn them against each other, blind the one and seduce the other.”

She met Hannibal Lecter’s dark eyes, attentive, yet somehow distant as if she wasn’t really here. It was the same expression Will Graham had worn. 

The formerly accused sat between Jack Crawford and Alana Bloom, whom exuded a subtle menace, leaning forward slightly when Ms. Vega looked at their charge, blocking her view of him. It was as if there was a silent agreement between Agent Crawford and Dr. Bloom that they were going to shield Will Graham as much as they could. They were still his champions. Will Graham’s ability to inspire devotion was a frightening thing. 

Doubly frightening when you considered that one of the devoted was the accused. Every once in a while Hannibal Lecter would glance at Will Graham. Agent Crawford and Dr. Bloom was lean forward at those moments, too, as if trying to block any eye contact between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. 

Just what did Dr. Bloom’s wife think of this devotion? She sat on the other side of Alana, holding her hand. She allowed her attention to roam around the room, flickering from her wife, to Will Graham, to Agent Crawford, to Ms. Vega herself and Byron Metcalf, but she always returned her steady, steely gaze to Hannibal Lecter.  


Dr. Lecter didn’t even acknowledge Margot Verger’s attention. It was as if the woman, her wife, and her brother, the man Lecter had murdered weren’t worth dwelling upon. Or perhaps he was trying not to look at her?

Hard to believe Margot Verger was as innocent a victim in all that had happened at Muskrat Farm as she claimed to be. 

“He formed a friendship, an intimacy with these people which he abused. He hid Will Graham’s encephelitus from him. He invited Dr. Frederick Chilton into his home and began exploiting his weaknesses. He blinded Dr. Alana Bloom with lies and misidirection. He convinced Abigail Hobbs he was her friend and her father, faking her death, taking her ear. He fed that ear to Will Graham, using access to Graham’s home to frame him for five murders.”

Ms. Vega raised her voice but in truth, she felt less in control of the situation than she had at Will Graham’s trial and that had been a disaster. She'd felt more in control at Frederick Chilton’s trial, even though his defense attorney had made a fool of her again by contemptuously accusing her of charging a vegan with difficulty in digesting animal proteins with the Chesapeake Ripper’s murders. 

“After which he killed a judge to stop Will Graham’s trial. He framed Dr. Frederick Chilton for Agent Beverly Katz’s death and brainwashed Miriam Lass into accusing him of being the Ripper and shooting him.”

Miriam Lass was sitting on Jack Crawford’s other side, trying to keep her face impassive. She rested her hand in another young woman’s about her age, a trainee at the academy who’d fallen off the rails for far less credible reasons than Miriam Lass had. She’d lost her temper, punched Kade Purnell in the face. Understandable, but a lapse in control one didn’t like to see in an F.B.I. Jack Crawford seemed to like the troublesome ones. What was her name? Something Starling. The young woman frowned at Dr. Lecter, but she also frowned at Dr. Chilton, Purnell, and half the people in the room. She gave no signs of the hot temper which had slowed her ascent through the ranks. 

Speaking of Dr. Chilton, he was on the other side of the courtroom with that bloody cane sitting next to Freddie Lounds and a few other people in suits. He kept looking at Dr. Bloom, Agent Crawford, and especially Will Graham as if he really wanted to be sitting near them. Not out of any particular friendliness but that was where the action was. 

The dark-haired man sitting at the edge of the row scowled at him. He and Agent Starling sat on either side of a rather prim-looking middle-aged man who studied Hannibal Lecter with a measure of angry sadness. He and the dark-haired man were also Agent Crawford’s, what were their names? Price and Zeller. 

All of these people studied Hannibal Lecter as if he were a horrifying riddle they wanted to understand, yet didn’t. All except for Will Graham. Graham simply looked at his hands, head bowed. He was reacting more to Lecter’s trial than he had his own. 

“In the end, Hannibal Lecter decided to discard his toys, the people he’d played with. He tried to kill Jack Crawford, Will Graham, and Dr. Alana Bloom. After protecting her for so long, he slashed Abigail Hobbs’s throat. He took his own therapist captive, broke her down like he had Miriam Lass, convinced her she was someone else.”

This made Will Graham look up, dart a hard glance in Bedelia Du Maurier’s direction. She was one of the suits surrounding Frederick Chilton, cool and distant, simply watching the performance. 

It seemed Will Graham had doubts about how much of a victim Du Maurier had been. Ms. Vega couldn’t agree more. 

“He disappeared into Europe until he found a man whose identity he could take, Dr. Roman Fell. He killed him and ate him along with his wife.” She fixed her attention upon Dr. Hannibal Lecter again. He was utterly unmoved. “You and Bedelia Du Maurier became that couple once he’d removed them.”

“Objection!” Byron Metcalf leapt to his feet. “There is no evidence that Dr. Du Maurier took any part in these murders.”

“Sustained,” the judge said. He kept his voice objective, but he was sweating. Perhaps he remembered the fate of a previous judge who’d gotten in Hannibal Lecter’s way. 

Not that Ms. Vega was convinced they were in Hannibal Lecter’s way, not this time. The maddening thing was she got the sense this whole trial, including her accusations, were part of his plan. 

“Once in Florence, Hannibal Lecter as Dr. Fell murdered his way to a position of authority at the Capone. He was in the perfect position to start conducting his murderous dinner parties with more than one victim dying at the table itself, only to make his way onto the dinner plate itself.”

“Objection,” Metcalf asserted again. “My client has already pleaded guilty. This is idle speculation.”

“The question is how guilty your client is.” Ms. Vega met her professional rival’s stare with one of her own. Metcalf didn’t frighten her. “He bludgeoned a young man to death in Florence only to transport his body to create a tableux of death for Will Graham, but this wasn’t the first time Hannibal Lecter had killed for Will Graham. He killed Cassie Boyle not long after he met Graham as a courting gift, a way to start convincing everyone that Will Graham was becoming a killer, and to insert his way into Will Graham’s head.”

Freddie Lounds leaned forward with an almost hungry eagerness as if every word fascinated her. Right. She was writing a book on Will Graham. All this was probably juicy material. Dr. Chilton, in the meantime was giving her a very dirty look. Perhaps because he regarded Hannibal Lecter as his intellectual property as Hannibal the Cannibal. Lounds was starting to trespass on his territory. 

“Only this wasn’t enough.” She returned her attention to Hannibal Lecter. “Hannibal Lecter had to literally get inside his head, to open up Will Graham’s skull.” She allowed herself a smirk. “One might presume sharing those contents with Jack Crawford would have been a generous gesture from this monster’s perspective.”

Ah, now there it was, a tiny flash of reaction in Hannibal Lecter’s eyes. No, he hadn’t like this accusation. 

“Perhaps it seemed like the therapeutic thing to do, to kill this man you once said would always be your friend.” Ms. Vega leaned a little closer. “Perhaps you reconstructed conversations with your own psychiatrist to come to this fatal conclusion. Only Mason Verger’s men came to kidnap you and Will Graham before you could fatally injure him.”

Once again, Hannibal Lecter allowed his gaze to move to Will Graham. This time Dr. Bloom and Agent Crawford weren’t fast enough. Graham lifted his head and met his gaze. Oh, the emotions glittering within them, unshed tears, anger, sorrow, and something more, something Ms. Vega had seen too often in the eyes of wives whose husbands were accused of multiple murders. 

“Objection!” Byron Metcalf, Hannibal Lecter’s lawyer called out with the predictability of an alarm clock. “This is more speculation.” 

“Is it speculation?” Ms. Vega whirled to face the judge. “Mason Verger and countless men died when they brought this monster in their midst. Whatever plans they had for Lecter and Graham failed and failed spectacularly. Those plans cost him his life.”

She met the hard, brittle gaze of Margot Verger. No, this young woman wasn’t mourning the loss of her brother. Not at all. Ms. Vega wouldn’t have been surprised if Margot Verger had commissioned Hannibal Lecter to murder her brother and gain his fortune. Dr. Bloom was now very pregnant with Mason Verger’s child, and there was a whole other story which probably would never be told. 

Freddie Lounds was on the exact same page. She studied Margot Verger with a cool, calculating stare that stripped the other woman of all her defenses. 

Margot Verger lifted her chin and stared back at Lounds. Dr. Bloom, sensing her wife’s unease, turned to the cause of it, giving Lounds a hard look of her own. 

This caused Freddie Lounds to smile a little. 

None of this seemed to phase Hannibal Lecter. He was in a state of contemplation, alert, yet detatched from what was happened. The only one who caught his attention from time to time was Will Graham. 

What was it like to be the object of obsession for a psychopathic psychiatrist? Fool Ms Vega might have, she refused to believe she’d been a complete fool in her condemnation of Will Graham. What happened to Randall Tier was proof of that. 

Anyone who could interest a man like Hannibal Lecter was hardly innocent. 

“Justice is still mindless and heartless.” For a moment Ms. Vega thought she heard the words, only Hannibal Lecter hadn’t spoken. “Will Graham was a martyr of convenience, not justice. Not even he was willing to save himself.”

Hannibal Lecter gazed at Will Graham, seeking him out as if he were the only person who mattered in the room. 

It was like before at Will Graham’s trial. Everyone else, the entire room seemed to go away. There was no one there except those two men. Not even Ms. Vega was there. 

Will Graham did not flinch or look away. He met Dr. Lecter’s dark, hungry gaze with a sorrowful green one of his own, simmering with other complex emotions. 

“Ever since I met him, everything I’ve done has been for him.”

Ms. Vega blinked, but Hannibal Lecter hadn’t spoken. He’d never looked away from Graham. 

Yes, that would be Byron Metcalf’s defense, wouldn’t it? Hannibal Lecter had already pleaded guilty. The defense was that Hannibal Lecter was capable of greater emotions than the simple intelligent psychopath the prosecution would paint of him. He did care about Will Graham. He cared about other people, but his sanity did not function in such a way that he could express that affection in a healthy way.

In short, Hannibal Lecter was insane. 

One could see the validity of Metcalfe’s argument. If only Ms. Vega didn’t feel strongly that they were only getting one tiny fragment in the truth. Both in her prosecution and Metcalfe’s defense. 

Oh, why was she worried about such things? Hannibal Lecter had pleaded guilty. Her job was to make him look as guilty as she could. To give the angry mobs the show of the monster being brought to judgment.

The truth was irrevelant, except in how well it served the law.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope I got the name of Hannibal's lawyer correctly. Francis Dolarhyde said his name in The Great Red Dragon but I'm not sure if I remembered it right...yes the comment about tracking mm into the courtroom was a play on what Will's lawyer said to Alana about Alana being smitten with the accused and that Ms. Vega would be able to smell it on her as if she tracked YA into the courtroom. Instead he had Hannibal testify. Whom was also smitten with the accused. And Ms. Vega did smell it on him as if he'd tracked mm into the courtroom, thus forcing Hannibal to take more, ahem, extreme measures to stop Will's trial. :)  
> I've created a back story for the Clarice Starling in these fanfics as someone who was very close to Miriam Lass before she disappeared. Clarice in my stories is a bit like the Clarice Bryan Fuller suggested in some of his commentaries and the other trainee in Silence of the Lambs whom Jodie Foster's Clarice trained with and shared ideas with.


End file.
